In the interests of providing my students (don't you love how I can own them with a single pronoun?) with a nudge into the wide world of the inter-webs where stories dwell upon dwell upon dwell, I've put some alternative "readings" on the syllabus. These begin with The Moth website.
(I'm also assigning The Onion, a TED talk, and a bevy of websites devoted to click-baiting college students. After all, we're studying creative writing, and I want to emphasize the creative part of the writing. Who knows, that is, what and where and how we'll be writing in 10, 20, 30 years? I never imagined, when I was a college senior, that I'd be tapping out a form of personal narrative into a book-sized computer and then, with a few clicks of buttons, pushing it out into cyberspace for you and other potential strangers and friends to read and even respond. Back then, we typed our workshop materials onto ditto forms, put them on a ditto machine, and cranked out 15 purple wet copies for the group.)
As I'm a fan of doing my own homework, I made sure to listen to the latest episode of Moth stories -- these are live events where storytellers (famous and not so) stand up in front of audiences without notes or scripts and tell a story. The Moth organizers, of course, first get you to pitch a potential story to them and then, if they decide to go with it, coach you into this live delivery.
And that's my way of telling you that, yes, you can't just get up there and wing it. The piece has been drafted, crafted, cut, rearranged, critiqued, and so on before it ever reaches the stage. The episode I found is titled "Facing the Dark," includes three stories. John Turtturo talks about his brother's mental illness, Daniela Schiller speaks about her father's memories of the Holocaust and her own work with psychological research on memory, and Kate Braestrup describes the importance of facing death -- in person -- in her piece, "The House of Mourning." I have to confess that this last piece is the one that most touched me, perhaps because of my own baggage with dead fathers.
Often when I'm listening to The Moth Radio Hour (it's a podcast) or StoryCorps (another podcast) or Snap Judgement (ditto), I'm struck by the immediacy of a story told in its human voice, as well as by the intimacy of the form. Instead of reading the words on the page in my own voice, at top speed, invisibly in my head, I'm using my ears to hear them, in a narrator's voice, with sound effects and pauses and (sometimes) mutual tears.
These experiences remind me that story is vital to us. It organizes the chaos of experience into sense. It makes the intangible tangible. It creates a light in the darkness. It populates the emptiness with friends.
And these oral stories also remind me where the heart of story resides: in the impulse to share our experience with others. All you need, The Moth producers remind us, is a person, a place and a problem. Then -- boom. Story happens, transforming teller and audience alike.
It's a powerful communion. And (in this case) it's free.
Wednesday, March 22, 2017
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
Mary Oliver is my Priestess of the Familiar
I suggested to others that they write about something they've read "outside of class" recently that has inspired or put them off. In other words, I've thrown down the gauntlet -- write about something that has elicited a strong reaction in you.
When I sat down today, my mind came up blank. I read and listen to a lot of things outside of class (podcasts, novels, short stories, textbooks, research articles, Facebook posts, tweets ... I'm getting dizzy just writing all of this down) but a lot of that just fades out of my brainpan nearly as fast as I cram it in.
Have I mentioned how hard it is to pay attention lately? So much for all of this mindfulness training.
Okay. I'm back.
And I've got something now. I really like Mary Oliver's poetry, and a few years ago I actually bought (on Kindle) her New and Selected Poems. Her poetry speaks to me because she's a master of the tight, concrete line, and her tone is often both wondering and severe. Her vision of nature as a repository of the divine comes the closest to my rough and incomplete vision of "god." Whenever I think about spiritual matters, I feel as if I'm trying to sketch in a very delicate mental picture with broken fat crayons. Oliver's work zings me with a kind of recognition, that low-level gut feeling of "oomph" that signals an incoming and felt truth. She's able to evoke in me a reverence for the natural world, the world outside of "people" and their "busyness," that I can only feel through poetry. It's a merging, I think, of the intellectual with the emotional, a full body sensation of discovery/recognition that I associate with moments (very brief, like nanoseconds) of mystery and revelation, of spiritual epiphany, blowing small holes in my atheist imagination.
She achieves this with simple and yet lush imagery, with a stark tone and direct vision. She embodies revelation in earthly things -- grass, beetles, birds. Like Whitman on a diet, she captures reverence in a snapshot of landscape.
Once I read an Oliver poem to start off a faculty meeting of some sort. I picked the poem because it transports me out of my mundane academic blah-blah and into something larger than myself. And because it has a dictatorial (pedantic?) message that I like: Be better than your own stupid self.
Here it is:
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.
*
I finished reading this poem and a strange hush lingered in the room. The meeting's leader said something like, "Well, that was something," and muttered about death and darkness. Of course the poem was about death. Of course it was a little lecture on living fully and facing the "cottage of darkness" with amazement, with particularity and realness. Like Mary Oliver, I don't want to die as a tourist. I want to die as a native of the world, having lived -- like a field daisy -- with singularity. And I want to walk through that doorway with curiosity and wonder.
When I sat down today, my mind came up blank. I read and listen to a lot of things outside of class (podcasts, novels, short stories, textbooks, research articles, Facebook posts, tweets ... I'm getting dizzy just writing all of this down) but a lot of that just fades out of my brainpan nearly as fast as I cram it in.
Have I mentioned how hard it is to pay attention lately? So much for all of this mindfulness training.
Okay. I'm back.
And I've got something now. I really like Mary Oliver's poetry, and a few years ago I actually bought (on Kindle) her New and Selected Poems. Her poetry speaks to me because she's a master of the tight, concrete line, and her tone is often both wondering and severe. Her vision of nature as a repository of the divine comes the closest to my rough and incomplete vision of "god." Whenever I think about spiritual matters, I feel as if I'm trying to sketch in a very delicate mental picture with broken fat crayons. Oliver's work zings me with a kind of recognition, that low-level gut feeling of "oomph" that signals an incoming and felt truth. She's able to evoke in me a reverence for the natural world, the world outside of "people" and their "busyness," that I can only feel through poetry. It's a merging, I think, of the intellectual with the emotional, a full body sensation of discovery/recognition that I associate with moments (very brief, like nanoseconds) of mystery and revelation, of spiritual epiphany, blowing small holes in my atheist imagination.
She achieves this with simple and yet lush imagery, with a stark tone and direct vision. She embodies revelation in earthly things -- grass, beetles, birds. Like Whitman on a diet, she captures reverence in a snapshot of landscape.
Once I read an Oliver poem to start off a faculty meeting of some sort. I picked the poem because it transports me out of my mundane academic blah-blah and into something larger than myself. And because it has a dictatorial (pedantic?) message that I like: Be better than your own stupid self.
Here it is:
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up having simply visited this world.
*
I finished reading this poem and a strange hush lingered in the room. The meeting's leader said something like, "Well, that was something," and muttered about death and darkness. Of course the poem was about death. Of course it was a little lecture on living fully and facing the "cottage of darkness" with amazement, with particularity and realness. Like Mary Oliver, I don't want to die as a tourist. I want to die as a native of the world, having lived -- like a field daisy -- with singularity. And I want to walk through that doorway with curiosity and wonder.
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